Neill! Neill! Orange Peel! A. S. Neill - Arvind Gupta

151 Pages·2010·1.22 MB·English

Neill! Neill! Orange Peel!
A. S. Neill

A Note about the Title
Years ago, Hetney, a little boy at Summerhill, went round muttering to himself:
“Neill! Neill! Orange Peel!” The phrase caught on and has lived for more than twenty-
five years. To this day, small children follow me around chanting the words, and my
usual reaction is: “Wrong again. Not orange peel—banana peel.”
I have selected this rhyme as the title of my autobiography, because it sums up my life
with children; indeed, it might be the motto for Summerhill, if we believed in mottoes.
These words tell the whole story of my school and my life. They show how the gulf
between generations can be bridged—or rather abolished—for they do not connote cheek
or hate: they mean love; they mean equality. If every kid in the world could call his
teacher Orange Peel, or an equivalent, my mail would not be filled with letters beginning:
“I hate my school; can I come to Summerhill?”
The little boy’s chant shows that there is no necessity for a gulf separating pupils from
teachers, a gulf made by adults, not children. Teachers want to be little gods protected by
dignity. They fear that if they act human, their authority will vanish and their classrooms
will become bedlams. They fear to abolish fear. Innumerable children are afraid of their
teachers. It is discipline that creates the fear. Ask any soldier if he fears his sergeant
major; I never met one who didn’t.
The Summerhill rhyme tells the world that a school can abolish fear of teachers and,
deeper down, fear of life. And it is not only Neill that the kids treat with equality and fun
and love; the whole staff are treated as pals and playmates. They do not stand on their
dignity, nor do they expect any deference because they are adults. Socially, the only
privilege the teachers have is their freedom from bedtime laws. Their food is that of the
school community. They are addressed by their first names and seldom are given
nicknames; and if they are, these are tokens of friendliness and equality. For thirty years,
George Corkhill, our science master, was George or Corks or Corkie. Every pupil loved
him.
Years ago, in one of my books, I wrote that when interviewing a prospective teacher,
my test was: “What would you do if a child called you a bloody fool?” It is my test today,
except that bloody—never a real swearword outside British realms—has been changed to
a more popular expletive.
More and more, I have come to believe that the greatest reform required in our schools
is the abolition of that chasm between young and old which perpetuates paternalism.
Such dictatorial authority gives a child an inferiority that persists throughout life; as an
adult, he merely exchanges the authority of the teacher for that of the boss.
An army may be a necessity, but no one, barring a dull conservative, would argue that
military life is a model for living. Yet our schools are army regiments or worse. Soldiers
at least move around a lot, but a child sits on his bottom most of the time at an age when
the whole human instinct is to move.
In this book, I explain why the powers that be try to devitalize children as they do, but
the mass of teachers do not understand what lies behind their discipline and “character
molding,” and most do not want to know. The disciplinary way is the easy one.
ATTENTION! STAND AT EASE! These are the orders of the barrack square and the
classroom.
Obey! Obey! they say, but people do not obey equals; they obey superiors. Obedience
implies fear, and that should be the last emotion encouraged in a school.
In the U.S.A., it is the student’s fear of bad grades— idiotic grades that mean nothing
of importance—or fear of not passing exams; in some countries—Britain among them, I
hate to admit—it is still fear of the cane or the belt, or the fear of being scorned or
mocked by stupid teachers.
The tragedy is that fear also exists on the teacher’s side— fear of being thought
human, fear of being found out by the uncanny intuition of children. I know this. Ten
years of teaching in state schools left me with no illusions about teachers. In my time, I,
too, was dignified, aloof, and a disciplinarian. I taught in a system that depended on the
tawse, as we called the belt in Scotland. My father used it and I followed suit, without
ever thinking about the rights and wrongs of it— until the day when I myself, as a
headmaster, belted a boy for insolence. A new, sudden thought came to me. What am I
doing? This boy is small, and I am big. Why am I hitting someone not my own size? I put
my tawse in the fire and never hit a child again.
The boy’s insolence had brought me down to his level; it offended my dignity, my
status as the ultimate authority. He had addressed me as if I were his equal, an
unpardonable affront. But today, sixty years later, thousands of teachers are still where I
was then. That sounds arrogant, but it is simply the raw truth that teachers largely refuse
to be people of flesh and blood.
Only yesterday, a young teacher told me that his headmaster had threatened him with
dismissal because a boy had addressed him as Bob. “What will happen to discipline if
you allow such familiarity?” he asked. “What would happen to a private who addressed
his colonel as Jim?”
I believe that in the Russian Army after the Revolution there were no barriers between
officers and men. They were all pals. But the system failed, I am told, and the army
returned to its old ways of class division and stem discipline.
Neill! Neill! Orange Peel! is a title that may shock the “dead” teachers. But it will be
understood by students in all lands—barring those in Iron Curtain countries who are
never allowed to hear of Summerhill.
Why do I get hundreds of letters from children? Not because of my beautiful eyes—
nay, but because the idea of Summerhill touches their depths, their longing for freedom,
their hatred of authority in home and school, their wish to be in contact with their elders.
Summerhill has no generation gap. If it had, half of my proposals in our general meetings
would not be outvoted. If it had, a girl of twelve could not tell a teacher that his lessons
are dull. I hasten to add that a teacher can tell a kid that he is being a damned nuisance.
Freedom must look both ways.
I do not want to be remembered as a great educator, for I am not. If I am to be
remembered at all, I hope it will be because I tried to break down the gulf between young
and old, tried to abolish fear in schools, tried to persuade teachers to be honest with
themselves and drop the protective amour they have worn for generations as a separation
from their pupils. I want to be remembered as an ordinary guy who believed that hate
never cured anything, that being on the side of the child—Horner Lane’s phrase—is the
only way to produce happy schooling and a happy life later on. As I am “Neill! Neill!
Orange Peel!” to my little pupils, so I would like to be to all the children in the world—
one who trusts children, who believes in original goodness and warmth, who sees in
authority only power and, too often, hate.
Soon I must shuffle off this mortal coil, but I hope that coming generations will look
back at the education of our time and marvel at its barbarity, its destruction of human
potentialities, its insane concern about formal learning. I hope, against everything that
makes me pessimistic: the wars, the religious suppression, the crimes. Cannot those who
yell for the hanging of criminals see that they are treating a ruptured appendix with
aspirin? Will not society recognize that it is our repressive system, plus the poverty of our
mean streets, plus our soulless, acquisitive society, that is making criminals and
neurotics?
I confess to dithering. One day, when I think of the challenge of the young, I am
optimistic; next day, when I scan the newspapers and read of rape and murder and wars
and racialism, I become engulfed by pessimism. But I guess that ambivalence is common
to us all.
Alexander Sutherland “Orange Peel’’ Neill
Summerhill 1972

My Beginnings
I was born on the 17th of October, 1883, in Forfar, Scotland. Forfar, which today is
the Angus County seat, is not far from Dundee and the Firth of Tay. The MacNeill clan
originally came from the island of Barra and later joined Bonnie Prince Charlie. Those
said to have deserted him before or after the battle of Prestonpans—before, I should
guess—settled down in and around the village of Tranent near Edinburgh,
The MacNeills became coal miners, and my grandfather, William MacNeill, worked
in the pits for many years. But as I first remember him, he had already left the pits and set
up a fish shop in Edinburgh. He came to visit us sometimes, a tall, distinguished-looking
man with a fine profile and long-fingered, sensitive hands. His hobby was fiddle-making.
As a boy, I was afraid of him, for he had a sarcastic tongue and I still recall one occasion
when I fell under its lash after trying to sharpen a pencil with his new hoi low-ground
razor. I think my father was afraid of him, too, for he was always a little strained when
the old man came to stay with us.
Though all my uncles had gone to work in the pits, my father was of less tough clay,
and having a flair for learning, was sent to be a student-teacher. 1 never knew why he
dropped the Mac from his name. Indeed, I never knew much about my father’s early life,
for he was not a communicative man. But I recollect his being very angry when his sister
Maggie told us about his boyhood days.
My mother was Mary Sutherland. Her mother had been a Sinclair, and her maternal
grandmother a Gunn. Granny Clunes Sinclair was one of a family of about twenty sons
and daughters, born to a farmer with small holdings in Caithness. They all died of
tuberculosis except herself. My Granny went to Leith (now part of Edinburgh) as a
servant girl, married Neil Sutherland who had something to do with the docks, and began
to rear a family on fourteen shillings a week. Then one night my grandfather was found
drowned, and Granny had to take in washing to support the family.
How it came, about that my mother—her only daughter— became a teacher, I do not
know. It must have meant tremendous self-sacrifice on the part of Granny. My father and
mother taught in the same school in Leith, and so their courtship began.
I have one or two of my father’s love letters, beautifully written in copperplate. They
are not real love letters and resemble the letters I used to write home: Today if was
raining . . .Jim Brown sprained his ankle last week. My mother had kept them all tied up
in pink ribbons, but she had taken care to burn all her letters to him. Only as a postscript
did my father usually send his love, yet I have a hazy memory of once uncovering
something more. This happened at the age of twelve when I was prowling about the
lumber room and found a box of Father’s letters. I recall being a little shocked at one of
them. He had just been reading Venus and Adonis, and his letter showed the eroticism
aroused by this poem. Reading it then, I was sure my mother must have been morally
outraged; now I am not so sure.
Granny Sinclair lived with us until her death when I was fourteen. As her favorite
grandchild, I think I must have loved her as much as a boy can love an old woman. She
used to suck peppermints, and her way of showing her love was to kiss me while shoving
a peppermint from her mouth into mine. She was very religious, read much in the family
Bible, and liked to tell us that as a girl she had walked nine miles to church every Sunday
and nine miles back. Her faith was a simple one of sheep and goats, with no doubts, no
skepticism whatsoever. I remember discovering the word bugger when I was about
seven, and Granny making me kneel down beside her to ask God for forgiveness. My
early fear of hell must have come from her. She made us read aloud to her from various
books of sermons, including Boston’s Fourfold Stale. Boston, apparently, had no doubts
either. For me, the most terrifying passage of that book was one in which the Man of
God, as Granny called him, gave a minute description of the pains of hell. It began in this
fashion; “If you want to know what the torments of hell are like, just light a candle and
hold your finger in the flame.” And because Granny and Boston had no doubts about
what was going to happen to sinners, I also had no doubts, but knew, as if by instinct, that
hell was my destination. Yet there was no hate in Granny. She was a very human, loving
old woman, and one of her joys was to listen to the often obscene gossip of the woman
from the cottage over the road.
My sister Clunes (named after Granny) had less timidity’ and faith than I had. She
wouldn’t have hell at any price; and when she took the next step and wouldn’t have God
and his heaven, I actually feared that she might be struck down dead on the spot. My
fright was caused by a grim story in Granny’s annotated Shorter Catechism about a
servant girl accused of stealing a silver spoon. “May God strike me down dead if I stole
the spoon!” she cried; and, of course, she fell down dead there and then, the silver spoon
tinkling on the floor. I reminded the atheistic Clunie of this tale more than once, but she
laughed me to scorn, and threatened to commit the unforgivable sin—blasphemy against
the Holy Ghost. She never did, but when my oldest brother Willie, at the age of thirteen,
stood out in a thunderstorm and invited the Almighty to strike him down dead for asking
God to perform an unnatural act on the Holy Ghost, I was terror-struck. As the thunder
crashed, I shut my eyes tight, opening them to whatever degree of skepticism I was
capable of having in those days, for Granny’s silver-spoon story had lost some of its
glory. It is of interest to note here that Willie became a minister.
When the psychologists say that our early experiences rule our lives, one is apt to
question. But I have had no doubts about this since 1918, when my dearly beloved sister
Clunie died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-four. In all her years, she had never
compromised her atheism. To her the Christian religion was both superstition and a cruel
humbug. Yet on her deathbed she kept muttering the prayers she had learned as a baby,
imploring God to save her soul. In the weakness of dying, she returned to emotions that
had slumbered for thirty years. To me, that was convincing proof that the feelings of
early childhood live on for a lifetime.
My granny was psychic. She had none of that second sight so often mentioned in
Scottish tales I heard all my youth— tales like the one about Old Tamson touching Mrs.
Broon on the shoulder in the kirk, and whispering: “Better go home, for your laddie has
just broken his neck”; after which Mrs. Broon drives the seven miles home to discover
that exact calamity. Many such stories were told in my boyhood, but it was always a case
of “I know a man who heard about it from the beadle,” No, Granny contented herself
with more simple phenomena: her special department was knocks. “I’m no’ long for this
life,” she would say, coming down from her room of a morning, very-very depressed. “I
heard three warning knocks, loud and clear. My Maker has called me.” And she would go
upstairs again to get her death linen in order. Naturally, we grew accustomed to her
premonitions, but suffered some remorse in the end when she died after hearing her
knocks.
It is difficult to look back and come to any conclusion about the over-all influence the
old woman had on me. She used to say to my mother: “Allie will be the best of the family
to you in your old age.” And it is true that I never neglected my parents in their old age,
although other members of the family may have given them more practical help than I
did. I do think that what older folks say to a child may have a great effect on later
behavior and thought. One of our neighbors once looked sadly at me when I was about
ten. “Eh, Mrs. Neill,” she said, “that laddie has death written in his face. He winna live
lang.” That remark haunted my life for years.
Death was no stranger to me. I had been at the burial of little members of the family
more than once, and knew the trappings of death and the tears—yes, and the airy relief
after the body was left in the grave. I must have attended three funerals before I was ten.
Counting a still-born infant, my mother had thirteen children in all. Years later, when we
used to criticize her for having so many, she indignantly told us that it was God’s will,
and she got furious with Clunie for saying: “That’s ail very well, but you had no right to
have me eleven months after Allie; and if you call that God’s will, He is to blame for my
poor health.”
Father walked back and forth to his school at Kingsmuir, two miles out. Later, when I
was about eight, we moved there after a new schoolhouse had been built. My earlier
memories of Forfar are vague and hazy. We lived in a third- or fourth-story flat, and one
of my pleasant recollections is playing trains in the long hall. Saturday morning was
market time for the farmers’ wives who brought in their butter and eggs; a hopeful time
for a small boy who might get tuppence for holding a horse, though my fear of horses
then makes me wonder how I had the pluck to go near one. To this day I pass a horse’s
heels uneasily. Sometimes on those Saturdays, we did manage to pick up a penny or two,
largesse from kindly farmwives whose bairns were at Kingsmuir School. This had to be
accepted surreptitiously, for one of my mother’s stern rules forbade us to accept money
or food from other people under any circumstances. For her, to have the children accept
little presents from others would have been classing her family with the lowest orders.
But we children found it hard to give a reasonable excuse for refusing Mrs. Findlay’s
offer of a delicious piece of bread with thick fresh butter and damson plum jam.
One day when I proudly told Mother that I had refused such a tempting dainty, she
smiled and told me I was a good boy. “Of course you said you weren’t hungry, didn’t
you?” “No,” I said with confidence, “just ‘Thank you, but my ma says I mustn’t take it.’
“And she slapped me hard.
She was a proud wee woman, my mother. To us her rule seemed cruel: naturally, we
did not understand the fear of patronage that lay behind it, a fear that came from her
lowly upbringing in a humble Leith home. Mother had high ambitions for herself and her
family. She was a snob, and she made us snobs.
The brothers and sisters of both my parents were poor folk of the working class,
speaking in dialects you could cut with a knife. Gradually, we came to believe they were
beneath us, and we acquired the well-known “poor-relation” complex. My mother
dexterously managed to keep her own relatives from visiting us—they were a hundred
miles away— with one exception.
Eccentric Uncle Neil was a barber in Brechin—a most unsuccessful one. He would
suddenly lock up his shop and go for a long walk. Legend said that on one occasion he
went off for a stroll in the midst of shaving a customer, leaving the man with one cheek
unshaved. He talked to himself a lot, which may explain his lack of success: a barber who
talks to himself while handling a razor will not build up a large business. But he was a
harmless man, and we were all very fond of him. When his business failed shortly after
Granny’s death—she had been helping him with her saved-up coins—he carne to live
with us. After a while, Mother began to suggest it was time he did something for a living.
One morning he got annoyed with her, bundled up his few belongings, and left. We never
saw nor heard of him again. The children missed him, for he was always generous with
sweets. I often wondered what happened to him.
Father’s people, apparently, were less immune to hints and sometimes would come to
stay with us. Old William MacNeill, my grandfather, was a man of strong convictions.
He had all the dourness of the Scot, and any subtle suggestion made him stiffen. My
mother could not forgive him his neckwear; he refused to wear a collar but wore a black
handkerchief instead. As I have said earlier, he was a distinguished-looking man; in my
mother’s eyes, however, a man whose neckwear betrayed his low-class origin. He could
make a fine fiddle with a penknife; he could make wonderful furniture with hidden
dovetails; he could tackle any mechanical job with skill and some art, but he would not
wear a collar. Worse yet, he always had a cackle in his throat and would spit anywhere.
Even as a child, I felt a tense atmosphere between my mother and him. He had definite
ideas about women: they were something lower than men in the scale of humanity; they
had to be kept in their place. Possibly Mother could have forgiven him his neckwear and
his spitting if only he had given her the right to be at least as important as he was.
There also was some confused story of my father’s family having spoiled Mother’s
wedding in some way: something about the MacNeills’ keeping father to themselves
when he ought to have started on his honeymoon. To her, the old man remained a bossy
old interferer.
Saturday mornings stand out as happy times. I can still smell the fresh, unsalted butter
in the market, still see the farmers’ gigs with their smart ponies. By midday, the ponies
had ail taken their masters home—literally—for in those days many of them got so drunk
that the pony had to find its own way without guidance. When motors came in and an
agent tried to sell Farmer Mosside one, Mossy looked at him beerily. “Here,” he said, “if
you can sell me a car that’ll bloody well take me home when I’m fu’, I’ll buy it.”
Glory departed with the gigs; Saturday afternoon was dreary and dull. We wandered
around the gray streets, often searching the gutter for treasure. Sammie Clark averred he
had once found a penny, but search as we might, we never found money. The richest
treasure I recollect was a cap gun with a broken trigger. Sometimes the town band would
play, and we would march along the street to the music. Clunie and I followed the band
one day to the Market Muir, a long way from home for toddlers’ feet. I had a sanitary
accident; and when I got home, my irate mother marched me down to the outside
washing house, took off the offending pants, and sent me running home with a hearty
slap on the bum. I must have been about six, yet I still can recall my fear that someone
would meet me in that pantless sprint. Mother seemed to get some amusement out of the
incident, for years later she referred to my speed that day as a criterion for swiftness.
Sundays always seemed a depressing time, when we were rigged up in Sabbath
clothes with starched collars and cuffs. We were accustomed to the collars, because
Mother prided herself on the fact that her boys wore genuine stiff collars even on
weekdays. She spoke bitterly of the lazy limmers who dressed their sons in ordinary
waterproof ones.
Getting ready for the kirk was hateful to us. We struggled with clumsy cufflinks: we
resentfully stood to have olive oil rubbed into our hair. We were all dressed up with
nowhere to go—nowhere, at any rate, that we wanted to go. We knew
there lay before us an hour and a half of extreme boredom, of sitting on a hard pew
with upright back—only the rich had cushions—of listening to dull psalms and hymns
and a seemingly interminable sermon by Dr. Caie. The one bright spot in the somber
picture was the tight-laced woman who had the pew in front of ours. Her waspish waist
had been gained at the expense of internal gurgles, and we beguiled the time during the
sermon by counting the intervals between gurgles. As the sermon dragged on, we found
that we had enough to do just keeping our sense of gravity. Occasionally, I imagine, the
sounds from the wasp-waisted one were drowned by our own unsuppressed splutters of
merriment. I don’t think the lady was conscious of our ribald attentions, for she often
turned around and gave us peppermints.
I was just getting on to Sunday School age when, luckily, the schoolhouse (our new
home) was finished, and we moved to Kingsmuir. Evidently my parents did not think it
necessary to send us to a Sunday School two miles away. Moving to the country stands
out as a happy milestone in my life. At five, I had gone to school in Forfar, daily toddling
the long two miles while holding my father’s hand. He was always a fast walker— even
at seventy-five he could outpace me—and my childish steps must have irritated him.
My father did not care for me when I was a boy. Often he was cruel to me, and I
acquired a definite fear of him, a fear that I never quite overcame in manhood. I see now
that Father did not like any children; he had no contact with them. He did not know how
to play, and he never understood the child’s mind. The boy he admired was the boy who
could beat the others in lessons; and since I never had any interest in lessons and could
not learn, I had no hope of gaining Father’s interest or affection. But in the time I am
writing of—the time I attended school as a toddler—the lesson element had not yet
appeared on the horizon. To him, I was merely a drag who made him late for school. He
had a lady assistant at that time, a long-legged girl who kept up with him athletically, and
I still see myself falling behind and whimpering in dread of being left.
I also remember another fear of those days: cattle. The Forfar cattle market was held
on Mondays, and the roads were full of cattle droves. I soon found that the droves
frightened Father, who sometimes even jumped a dyke with me when we met what
looked like a dangerous beast. In the manner of all boys, I believed that my father could
fight a score of lions, and to see him scuttle ignominiously over a wall to escape a herd of
bulls must have pricked the bubble of my faith. Like his father before him, he was a timid
man.
Old William MacNeill was so afraid of the dark that when he was courting my
grandmother, she had to come from her village to meet him in his. My father always
feared the dark, and in later years when he returned from Edinburgh by the midnight
mail, my brothers and I had to meet him at the station about two in the morning.
My mother was fearless, partly because she had less imagination than Father. I recall
the day she set off to town, presumably to shop. She returned, having had all her top teeth
extracted. Local anesthetics were then unknown, and only the rich could afford gas.
We certainly were not rich. My father’s salary was never more than 130 pounds a
year, and how they brought up eight children, sending three of us to the university, is a
mystery. Only great self-sacrifice could explain it. My mother augmented our meager
income by dyeing and curling feathers, and my father spent nothing on himself. He
neither smoked nor drank. Other teachers could have their golf and their bowls; he had no
games and no hobbies. Once he tried to join in a village game of quoits, but my mother
put her foot down: “George Neill, think of your position! You can’t lower yourself to
play games with plowmen and railway men,”
I fear that mother’s emphasis on social position cramped our style. In summer, when
the whole school went barefoot, we children alone had to wear hot stockings and boots—
also those stiff starched collars.
Mother had a mania for laundry, and she washed well and ironed perfectly. If her
family did not become ladies and gentlemen, it would not be her fault. We had to speak
English in the house, but of course we spoke broad Forfarshire outside. How we managed
to change slickly from one to the other is astounding: we never seemed to make a
mistake. The inside boots automatically became bates when we talked to Jock Broon.
One of our grievances was not being allowed to work as the common children did. In
the potato-harvest holidays, they all went gathering on the farms. In the berry season,
they all went picking strawberries. The “aristocratic” Neills could not be allowed to
behave as menials. But a day carne when economic circumstances overruled snobbery.
Then thirteen, I was sent to the strawberries and potatoes, and hated the toil. Snobbery
gave way because my oldest brother Willie was acting the spendthrift at St. Andrews
University.
Moving to the new schoolhouse in Kingsmuir broadened our view of life. In Forfar,
our horizon had been the churchyard; here it extended farther. The smell of new wood
always takes me back to that house; to us it was heaven, and for many years, the center of
my world. Clunie died in the wee bedroom where I had slept for years—Clunie, the
playmate I loved so much; for my two elder brothers left me out of things and I was
forced to make her my chum. The strange thing is that I can look at that schoolhouse now
without any emotion. I cannot sentimentalize what has gone, and perhaps that is a good
thing, for hankering after the past often denotes a disappointing present. If we go
backward to find our emotions, something is far wrong; equally wrong is the forward
look, toward bliss in the next world.
Father’s school was on one side of the road; our dwelling, the schoolhouse, on the
opposite side. The house had a parlor, dining room, kitchen, and five bedrooms. Our loo
was an earth closet far up the garden. I cannot remember if we appreciated the fact that
instead of a two-mile uphill walk to school each morning, we simply had to cross the
road. I may have, but my brothers soon had to go to Forfar Academy and walk two miles
again, morning and evening.
The penny-farthing bicycle was then in use, though we never knew it by that name and
simply called it a “high” bicycle. The “safety,” growing in popularity, had solid rubber
tires, rather like those of a baby carriage, and was displaced by the “cushion,” a bicycle
with thicker solid tires. I cannot remember when the “pneumatic” came in, but have a
vague recollection of seeing the great racer Killacky riding a cycle with inflated tires
about as big as the modern low pressure automobile tire. But bicycles were unknown to
the poor in those days, and my brothers had to walk.
Forfar Academy was the stepping stone to a university education. To my father,
advancement in life meant advancement in learning. We were to be scholars, and Willie
led the way. In the Academy, he topped his class in most subjects, and won the gold
medal—or, rather, tied for it with a boy called Craik, son of an important jute
manufacturer in town. My mother strongly believed that Craik was in the tie only because
of his bigwig father, a natural opinion for her to have. But Willie was the hope of the
house. His brilliance as a scholar seemed remarkable. Without visibly doing any work, he
managed to go to university at sixteen and win further medals there. His method was to
sit up for three nights before the exam with a wet towel around his head, and his memory
was prodigious.
Willie’s brilliance had unhappy effects on all the members of the family. Neil, who
came between Willie and me, also went to the Academy. He was no great scholar and he
did not worry much when the teachers made nasty comparisons between his work and
Willie’s.
When it came my turn to go to the Academy, I was not sent. I was the only one of the
family who never went to the Academy. The sad truth is that it would have been useless
and hopeless to send me there, for I could not learn. My father still did not care much for
me, and little wonder; I was obviously the inferior article, the misfit in a tradition of
academic success, and automatically I accepted an inferior status. If there was a
particularly hard and unappetizing heel to a loaf, my father would cut it off with a
flourish; with another flourish, he would toss it over the table in my direction, saying:
“It’ll do for Allie.”
Chime used to wax indignant at the way I was treated, but she never had the courage
to attack my father on the subject. I recall her vigorous protest against my having to wear
Willie’s cast-off clothes; but adoring Willie so much at that time, I may have given her a
clump on the ear for interfering. In all fairness, I still do not know why all the others were
sent to the Academy, Clunie was clever but no prizewinner, and the other sisters did
nothing important academically.
I was the only one who began and completed his schooling in the village. This was
unfortunate, for it kept me tied to the old folks too long and prevented my measuring
myself against the more sophisticated boys in the town. Not that Forfar Academy would
have helped me at all educationally; there I surely would have been near the bottom of
every class.

Early Schooldays
Kingsmuir School was a two-roomed building divided into the “big” and “little”
rooms. In the big room, my father had Standards IV to ex-VI, ex-VI being composed of
the few boys who remained in school after age fourteen. The ‘“Missy” kept the younger
children in the little room.
If Father was to give Class V a lesson in geography, he told a boy to hang the map on
the blackboard. While this was being done, test cards in arithmetic were given out to
Standard III. Standard IV might be ordered to learn its spelling, while Standard VI read.
Heaven only knows what the ex-VI’s were doing. My father would stand at the map, and
I can still hear the geography class shouting in unison; “Leeds, Bradford, Halifax,
Wakefield.” After a few minutes, he would leave this class to its own devices and take
the reading of the VI’s. Naturally, it was a noisy room. We spent much of our time
talking, also drawing on our dirty slates, which we cleaned by spitting on them and then
rubbing them with the palm of the hand. We never seemed to tire of tilting our slates so
that the spittle would make slimy designs.
It was in the main a happy school. Sometimes my father used the strap a lot, especially
when exasperated by the dunces, for his salary depended on the number of Standard V
students he passed. For some obscure reason, Standard V came to be the parking place of
dunces; as Inspection Day approached, and my father got more and more irritable, the
blows of the strap grew many and hard. Lest he be accused of favoritism, he punished his
family as severely as the others, and I came in for more than my fair share when the